The present invention relates to a performance measurement and service quality monitoring server capable of collecting performance information within a set of equipment over a communication network, this server comprising a generic performance model to process high-level indicators and dedicated performance models for each type of equipment to be monitored.
The increasing complexity of information systems integrating in particular, client-server architectures and integrated local area networks, makes effective management of the quality of service more and more difficult within these systems. On the one hand, the administrators and managers of these information systems are led to adopt a service approach towards users and to operate as service providers concerned about the quality of services provided at the same time as being faced with reductions in operating costs, and on the other hand, the users of these services demand yet higher levels of quality of service.
Control over the quality of service involves a reliable feedback system of relevant information originating from the different resources of the information system. It is, however, difficult to make use of the large-volume performance data references residing in the network equipment, in the systems and in the software applications, to consolidate such data and then to reconstruct it in the form of summary status reports for the purpose of capacity or service quality management. There is a need, on the one hand, for management of service quality at user level: availability, application response time, reactivity in the event of a technical support incident and, on the other hand, for management of technical service quality with respect to the infrastructure itself: traffic, network transit time, consumption of central processing unit time, etc.
Moreover, there are numerous different operating systems. In order to be able to manage the greatest number of resources, it is sometimes necessary to develop a dedicated application for each operating system. The purpose of such applications is to provide for communication between the resource to be managed (network equipment) and the remote management server. In this respect, there is, for example the Patrol application from BMC Software®, which needs to be installed, configured and administered in network equipment, which may be an interconnection node subject to a great load. Such an application is highly intrusive and this constitutes a considerable constraint, which may present risks of incompatibility or at least disruption of the operating system in the network equipment. Such an implementation does not offer any guarantees of maximum stability.
There is also the SNMP agent (Simple Network Management Protocol), providing for remote or local administration on Internet type networks. This method displays a certain amount of information through MIB files specific to each piece of hardware and manufacturer.
Now, it may be the case that:                some equipment does not have an SNMP interface allowing for the collection of performance data,        equipment is fitted with an SNMP agent, but some performance data are not accessible through this SNMP agent,        some performance data are no longer accessible in SNMP owing to developments in the software used on the equipment or to security constraints.        